As a retired negotiator (lawyer), my question is what does Trump REALLY want in the budget? He and President Bannon are loving the outrage so when they get what they want they can put Meals on Wheels, CPB and NEA back and look "reasonable". They love shock and awe. They are great on shock but losing bigly on awe.

"The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press." - Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, feminist and founder with others of NAACP.

Some of President Trump’s best friends in Congress sharply criticized his first budget Thursday, with defense hawks saying the proposed hike in Pentagon spending wasn’t big enough, while rural conservatives and others attacked plans to cut a wide range of federal agencies and programs.

The bad mood among Republican critics was tempered by a consensus that the president’s budget wasn’t going very far on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers reminded everybody that they ultimately control the nation’s purse strings.

“While we have a responsibility to reduce our federal deficit, I am disappointed that many of the reductions and eliminations proposed in the president’s skinny budget are draconian, careless and counterproductive,” Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) the former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement. “We will certainly review this budget proposal, but Congress ultimately has the power of the purse.”

“We’ve not had our chance yet,” he added in an interview.

Rogers was one of several GOP lawmakers to dismiss Trump’s budget as a pie-in-the sky wish list with little hope of surviving negotiations in Congress. Most Republicans gave passing support to Trump’s general goal of increasing defense spending while reducing costs elsewhere in the budget. But none of the Republicans interviewed would embrace the specific White House blueprint.

Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY), who was the first member of Congress to endorse President Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign, said on Thursday night that he does not support the administration's proposal to cut funding for the Meals on Wheels program.

"This is the President's budget, I'm not sure where the details came from. But when we get into appropriations, Meals on Wheels is a wonderful program. It is one I would never vote to cut even one dollar," Collins told CNN's Van Jones.

Trump's budget blueprint release on Thursday eliminates the Community Development Block Grant program, which gives states money for projects like Meals on Wheels, a program that provides food to poor, elderly Americans.

During a press conference on Thursday, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney defended the cuts and suggested that the program doesn't show "results."

One of Mrs. V's cousins who died a few years ago received MOW for a few years before he died. At the time he was living alone with few close neighbors. It was a good program. It helped keep him fed. He was disabled, could no longer drive himself anywhere and was living on a small SS check. He could have moved in with family elsewhere but he didn't want to relocate. (Later one of his younger brothers retired, moved next door to him and took care of him until the end.)

It boggles the mind that someone would say that such a program does not show results. What more results do you need than elderly people getting fed?

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Cancer researchers and advocacy groups are denouncing President Trump's proposed budget, warning that its 19 percent cut for the National Institutes of Health could cripple or kill former vice president Joe Biden’s cancer “moonshot” initiative and other important biomedical efforts.

“Forget about the moonshot. What about everything on the ground?” said George Demetri, an oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “Fundamentally, this is so extreme that all I can think is that it’s pushing two orders of magnitude off the grid so that when people come back to less extreme positions it looks normal.”

Among people who work in the life sciences, Demetri said, “there is a stunned speechlessness.”

The budget blueprint released Thursday did not include specific numbers for individual NIH institutes, such as the National Cancer Institute. Still, the proposed cuts represent a sharp turnaround from the Obama administration as well as congressional supporters, who pressed for more NIH funding in recent years. The Obama White House in particular pushed the moonshot initiative to try to accelerate progress against the disease.

Dallasite wrote:Mulvaney said they were cutting funding for meals for school children because there was no proof it helped the children learn better.

That is total B.S. ! If they didn't have the food they would sleep through class or be distracted by hunger pains. If it isn't a dollar sign result, it doesn't count apparently.

"The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press." - Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, feminist and founder with others of NAACP.

Cancer researchers and advocacy groups are denouncing President Trump's proposed budget, warning that its 19 percent cut for the National Institutes of Health could cripple or kill former vice president Joe Biden’s cancer “moonshot” initiative and other important biomedical efforts.

“Forget about the moonshot. What about everything on the ground?” said George Demetri, an oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “Fundamentally, this is so extreme that all I can think is that it’s pushing two orders of magnitude off the grid so that when people come back to less extreme positions it looks normal.”

Among people who work in the life sciences, Demetri said, “there is a stunned speechlessness.”

The budget blueprint released Thursday did not include specific numbers for individual NIH institutes, such as the National Cancer Institute. Still, the proposed cuts represent a sharp turnaround from the Obama administration as well as congressional supporters, who pressed for more NIH funding in recent years. The Obama White House in particular pushed the moonshot initiative to try to accelerate progress against the disease.

As someone hoping to get a small business grant from the NIH (and to work with NIH scientists), this is probably what would impact me the most in this travesty of a budget. While this is significant personally, it pales in comparison to the sheer idiocy and lack of concern for fellow humans of not continuing to strongly support the cancer moonshot.

A deplorable is as a deplorable does.

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."
---Sun Tzu (quoting Thomas Jefferson)nam-myoho-renge-kyo---Thomas Jefferson (quoting Slartibartfast)

NASA Crewed Mission to AsteroidThe Obama-era Asteroid Redirect Mission is one of several casualties of the $19.1-billion budget request

By Tariq Malik, SPACE.com on March 16, 2017

The Trump administration released its 2018 budget request today (March 16), a proposal that calls for the cancellation of NASA's astronauts-to-an-asteroid mission along with four Earth Science missions and NASA's Office of Education.

The White House's first budget request for NASA offers $19.1 billion for the space agency in 2018, a 0.8-percent decrease from 2017 space-spending levels, according to the Office of Management and Budget. NASA is currently working under funding approved by a continuing resolution that expires April 28.

The 2018 budget request cancels NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission—an Obama administration-era project to bring part of an asteroid near the moon so astronauts could visit the space rock and retrieve samples—but included no details on cancelation other than it was needed "to accommodate increasing development costs." Instead, Trump's budget allocates $3.7 billion for NASA's Orion space capsule and Space Launch System megarocket "to send American astronauts on deep-space missions." [How Orion and SLS Will Launch Astronauts]

The ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, is an international organization that does receive some governmental funding. If U.S. funding for it is taken away, I believe that other countries will step forward a bit. That is because such international environmental standards as ISO 14000 and ISO 14001 have become commercially important. ISO certification can open or re-open a door for manufacturers. At one time when I was consulting with Ford (for no pay), the Chairman decided that Ford would soon require ISO certification for all its parts suppliers. Not much later I went to Thailand on a lecture tour. The ring road around Bangkok, which served almost of Bangkok's new manufacturing, was lined with huge banners proclaiming that this facility had achieved ISO certification. My hosts were very proud of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_14000

A different kind of certification is provided by the Anti-Slavery Society. When possible it works with local LEO. You see its effect if you buy a small rug that has the Rugmark or Goodweave label on it. That means that (enslaved) child labor was not employed to manufacture that rug, despite the mechanical advantages that children's small hands confer. https://newint.org/easier-english/child ... gmark.html

“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.” Kurt Vonnegut

The proposed budget cuts foreign aid to the bone. One of the purposes of foreign aid was to help induce countries away from the Kremlin. Now that the foreign aid is made to disappear it is possible that some of those countries will be more inclined to cozy up to the Russians. Why would our Manchurian Candidate do this?

TollandRCR wrote: The ring road around Bangkok, which served almost of Bangkok's new manufacturing, was lined with huge banners proclaiming that this facility had achieved ISO certification. My hosts were very proud of this.

Thai companies still think they are making some marvelous contribution with ISO certifications, especially the 9000 series

The proposed budget cuts out money for the school lunches for poor children and for Meals on Wheels. In other words, deliberately starving out the neediest and most helpless of society. In the meantime, tax breaks for billionaires.

President Trump traveled to Michigan last week and promised to recreate the industrial America that existed when Willow Run was “the arsenal of democracy” and Rosie the Riveter was a celebrated symbol of its work force. He would do this, he said, by lifting burdensome regulations and ending unfair foreign competition. By the time he was through, he promised, the 900 jobs that General Motors announced on Wednesday that it would retain or add in Michigan would look like “peanuts.”

On and on he went, talking doomsday nonsense and making outlandish promises to an American industry already enjoying record profits and adding jobs. Which raises the question: What is Mr. Trump himself actually doing to meet his campaign pledge of 25 million jobs for working-class Americans?

In a word, peanuts. His jobs strategy, to the extent he has one, is full of switchbacks and detours, the destination nowhere in sight. He tears up trade agreements that could lower the price of American products abroad, then backs a border tax that would raise the cost of components for manufacturers here. Instead of the $1 trillion infrastructure spending bill he promised, he sends Congress a budget proposal right out of the Republican establishment playbook that spends a ton on defense while shortchanging job retraining programs and public investment in essential needs.

And then there’s his rotelike rejection of environmental rules. History shows that well-tailored regulation drives innovation and creates jobs. This is true in fields like energy, where clean air mandates led to big investments in wind and solar power, and it is true also of the automobile industry, which has prospered under President Obama’s ambitious fuel economy standards. But Mr. Trump — in thrall to those who see all regulations as job-killers — would ease these rules for an industry that has not only done well under them but that owes the American taxpayer big league for successive bailouts in the Bush and Obama administrations.

WASHINGTON — President Trump's Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney on Sunday defended the administration's budget blueprint for not reducing the federal deficit — despite his past reputation as a deficit hawk member of Congress.

"Keep in mind, the administration is different than members of the Hill, the members of the House and the Senate," Mulvaney told host Chuck Todd on "Meet The Press."

"Every House member, which I used to be, has a constituency," said Mulvaney. "We have a group of people we represent. Senators represent the whole state. There's also a lot of special interests, a lot of lobbying involved. The president's not beholden to any of that. The president represents everybody."

Mulvaney estimates that if the president's budget were to be approved by Congress, that the deficit would remain the same as it is now. On the campaign trail, then-candidate Trump repeatedly promised to balance the budget "quickly," and at one point, even made a pledge to get rid of the federal debt in eight years.

SueDB wrote:I've found that more time than not, there is a real serious reason there is a regulation. 45 wants regulation, but his kind of regulation benefiting the greedy bastards and not the American folks.

"The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press." - Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, feminist and founder with others of NAACP.